With a few minor exceptions, the Bass Lake run came off with little incident. Mercifully, Thompson didn’t have to contend with any epic brawls between the Angels and their enemies. “He was trying to outdo Hemingway by living the life he was writing about,” said illustrator and frequent Thompson collaborator Ralph Steadman. “His attitude was, if you buy the ticket, you have to take the ride.”
Thompson figured he’d be on safer ground when he brought some of the Angels, including Barger and Terry the Tramp, to a Labor Day gathering at Ken Kesey’s La Honda compound. Despite Thompson’s reservations about bringing the Angels to La Honda (“I knew violent freaks when I saw them”), the Angels had in fact already spent some time there. A few months prior, Barger and a handful of fellow Angels had provoked the cops into a mad cat-and-mouse chase through the woods en route to Kesey’s place; when the bikes passed through the La Honda gates, the Pranksters closed them instantly, shutting out the heat.
Kesey, who was out on bail pending his trial for the two marijuana busts, had returned to La Honda like a man unburdened and eager to resume his position as the titular leader of the Merry Pranksters. For an ex-fugitive staring down the possibility of a long prison term, Kesey’s relationship with the Angels was a risky provocation, considering the close tabs the cops were keeping on the gang. In Hell’s Angels, Thompson claims to have introduced the Angels to the Pranksters; Tom Wolfe, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, relates the same story. But a handful of the Angels had in fact known Kesey since the late 1950s, when he lived on Perry Lane.
At the 1965 Labor Day gathering, Thompson was accompanied by Sandy and his baby boy, Juan, along with a number of San Francisco Angels, including Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, and Barger. It was a surreal scene: a phalanx of San Mateo County cop cars stood watch on the edge of Kesey’s property, their headlights illuminating the cliff at the edge of the road leading to Kesey’s compound like lighthouse sentries. Undaunted, Kesey hung a fifteen-foot sign in front of the property that read THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL’S ANGELS. For many of the Angels, the La Honda party was their initiation into psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, which was still legal and always in abundant supply.
The Angels took to LSD readily, but its effects varied. “They were wandering around, counting the number of cosmos that could be seen on the head of a pin, and contemplating the philosophies of various Nazis,” said Ken Babbs. A few members, such as Terry the Tramp and Magoo, had paranoid delusions. One night, Thompson writes in Hell’s Angels, Terry “was convinced that he’d died as a person and come back to life as a rooster which was going to be cooked on the bonfire just as soon as the music stopped. Toward the end of every dance he would rush over to the tape recorder, shouting ‘NO! No! Don’t let it stop!’” Despite Thompson’s claim in the book that “most of the Angels became oddly peaceful on acid,” Sonny Barger remembers a few nights in which the going got rough. “The Pranksters weren’t fighters, and so sometimes they would say things they shouldn’t say. A lot of Pranksters got beat up at times.”
Despite the occasional flare-up, the Angels consorted well with the Pranksters; Barger became friends with Ken Babbs and Carolyn Adams, aka “Mountain Girl,” Kesey’s mistress. Thompson, for his part, tended to keep his distance from the Angels at the La Honda parties, partaking in the merriment but chronicling it all on his tape recorder, including the gang rape that both Thompson and Wolfe would recount. “Hunter was an unassuming guy in those days,” said Ken Babbs. “He was just lurking around, collecting material for his book, though we really didn’t know what he was up to at the time.”
By the winter of 1965 Thompson had accumulated enough material on the Angels to begin writing the book. He now occupied a strange position in the Angels’ universe: an outsider on the inside. Thompson had become something of an unofficial publicist for the club, a go-between who fielded interview requests from reporters. Sonny Barger, who was well aware of the kind of scoop Thompson had on his hands, and that his book would be more accurate than anything previously published, was starting to demand recompense. First Barger asked for money, but when Thompson assured him that he was nearly broke, it became a keg of beer. “Hunter just didn’t understand me at all,” said Barger.
Thompson stalled on the keg; he wasn’t about to pay the Angels for their time. He stopped hanging out at El Adobe, shut himself into his apartment, and sat down at his rented IBM Selectric typewriter. It took him six months to write the first half of the book, far longer than he had anticipated; occasionally the stray Angel would drop by to drink his beer and have a look at some manuscript pages. Thompson didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes; although the book wasn’t necessarily an authorized history of the Angels, accuracy was crucial, lest he get his head stomped in. As his deadline loomed, Thompson panicked. He assumed the contract would be canceled if the book wasn’t turned in on time. So he packed up his typewriter and a case of Wild Turkey and started driving south on the 101 freeway until he found a suitably isolated motel near the Monterey peninsula where he could work. Hunkering down, he wrote about forty thousand words in four days.
The book was completed, but there were other matters that still rankled, such as the book cover that Random House’s art department had cooked up, which Thompson ranked among “one of the worst goddamn covers of any book I had ever seen.” It would have to be reshot, but Thompson would do it right this time, with his own camera. He negotiated a deal with his publishers whereby they would pay for his traveling expenses and film if he could get the Angels to pose for a suitable photograph. It was time for another run, but unlike Bass Lake, which had transpired in the middle of Thompson’s yearlong tenure with the club, this time he was going in cold, having been out of touch with most of the Angels for almost six months. He gassed up his car and headed out to Squaw Rock near Mendocino, where the Angels were spending their Labor Day weekend.
At first things proceeded as they had at Bass Lake. The Angels conducted their usual rituals—staying up all night on the first night of the run and getting looped on beer and bennies, swimming in the lake fully clothed, pawing their mammas. Thompson kept up with them every step of the way this time, his camera around his neck and primed for the perfect cover shot. But Thompson’s comfort level turned to complacency. “I had violated my own rules about staying out all night on a run,” said Thompson. “But I had shot a lot of film that day, and I got lazy.” When Hell’s Angel Junkie George got into a dispute with his girlfriend and hit her across the face, Thompson barked that “only punks beat up girls.” Before he knew it, Junkie George had rabbit-punched him on the back of the head, and other Angels, including Frisco and Papa Ralph, piled on. “It was the ancient and honorable Angels ethic—all on one, and one on all,” said Thompson. As Thompson described it to Playboy magazine:
When I grabbed the guy, he was small enough so that I could turn him around, pin his arms and just hold him. And I turned to the guy I’d been talking to and said something like, “Jesus Christ, look at this nut, he just hit me in the fucking face, get him away from here,” and the guy I was holding began to scream in this high wild voice because I had him helpless, and instead of telling him to calm down, the other guy cracked me in the side of the head—and then I knew I was in trouble.
Just as Junkie George was about to apply the finishing touch—a boulder aimed straight for Thompson’s skull—Tiny the Tramp intervened. Thompson ran to his car and drove to the nearest police station, bleeding profusely like a hockey player after a vicious check, only to be told to leave because he was making a mess. He had to drive sixty miles out of town to a doctor he knew in Santa Rosa, but it turned out the doctor was vacationing in Arizona. Thompson made a beeline for the ER at the local hospital and found a number of Gypsy Jokers in the waiting room, laid out with broken bones and blood everywhere—the result of an altercation earlier in the day with a number of Hell’s Angels. Thompson, his nose completely out of whack, had no time to wait for a doctor with a backlog of bikers. So he dro
ve to the nearest general store, bought a six-pack to anesthetize himself, and proceeded to reset his nose, “using the dome of the rearview mirror, trying to remember what my nose had looked like.”
Thompson’s editor at Random House, Jim Silberman, wasn’t at all surprised when his writer told him what happened. “I told Hunter, ‘Your method of research is to tie yourself to a railroad track when you know a train is coming to it, and see what happens,’” he said. “He wants a story in which something like that will happen. He’s looking for a provocation. He needed that ending, because he was really struggling with an ending for the book.”
Sonny Barger regarded the incident as a chance for Thompson to close out his book with a rousing and shocking climax. “He was there for a specific reason, to get beat up,” he said. “Hunter had been around long enough to know that’s what’s gonna happen if you get out of line, how far you could push it.” Thompson admitted that “at the time, I recognized it was valuable for the book,” though he denied that he was there specifically to provoke a fight. “Being stomped sort of goes with the territory, but I was pissed off when it happened.”
Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga was published in February 1967. Early reviews were effusive. The book, Richard Elman wrote in the New Republic, “asserts a kind of Rimbaud delirium of spirit for nearly everybody to which, of course, only the rarest geniuses can come close.” The New York Times’s Leo Litwak praised Thompson’s sure-handed control of his material: “His language is brilliant, his eye is remarkable, and his point of view is reminiscent of Huck Finn’s.”
Sales were brisk right off the bat. By April over fifty thousand copies were in print. Demand was such that Random House couldn’t print books fast enough, much to the dismay of its author. A handful of the bookstores that Thompson visited on his thirty-five-day publicity tour had sold out and had neglected to order more copies, leaving its author shilling a product that wasn’t available. “I didn’t realize it was a hit,” said Thompson. “I thought that Random House had fucked up. They had dingbats and interns handling the publicity, so I was worried that no one was receiving copies.”
Thompson lashed out at Jim Silberman, who assured him that the book was indeed being placed in stores and selling briskly. “The sales force was very enthusiastic about the book,” said Silberman. “And the book advanced in stores pretty well. It was a success from the beginning. In those days, before the chain stores, you might run into a situation where certain stores didn’t have the book, but no one was surprised when it hit the bestseller list. It was a hot topic, and a brand-new voice.”
It was a curious way to sell a book: using the sensational tabloid hook (“long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome, jamming crazy through traffic at 90 miles an hour like a burst of dirty thunder,” the paperback jacket copy screamed) for a story that didn’t resort to cheap scare tactics. The Hell’s Angels had been exploited in so many ways—by the mainstream media, in tawdry B-movies and pulp novels—but only Thompson had bothered to work his way through the fabrications, to hang in there long enough to gain their confidence and ask them questions. As if to prove the veracity of his reporting versus the distortions of the press, Thompson devoted the first third of the book to a systematic debunking of Angels myths—the Lynch Report in particular, which Thompson called “a piece of gold that fell into my lap.” In Thompson’s view, the Lynch Report poisoned the well; its fallacies were taken as gospel truth by reporters who were all too eager to perpetuate them.
“There is not much argument about basic facts,” Thompson writes in regard to Newsweek’s distorted coverage of an Angels run to Porterville, California, “but the disparities in emphasis and content are the difference between a headline and a filler in most big-city newspapers.” If the public perception of the Hell’s Angels as an authentic menace proved anything, it was “the awesome power of the New York press establishment.”
Thompson went back to George Orwell’s 1931 book Down and Out in Paris and London, one of his favorites, in which Orwell recounted his experience living among London’s poor. There is a clear-eyed candor at work in Orwell’s reportage, a reluctance to pass judgment or moralize, that Thompson took to heart, even if it seemed that the Angels would be a thornier subject with which to empathize. Thompson wanted neither sympathy nor opprobrium from his readers; he just wanted them to respect the truth, to understand the Angels in their proper historical context as a peculiar phenomenon of American history.
The Hell’s Angels didn’t emerge fully formed out of nowhere. Rather, they were a product of the country’s nomadic forebears: the Dust Bowlers of the 1930s in search of arable land, the World War II vets who opted out of the G.I. Bill for something less settled and predictable, in short the whole western tradition of boundless exploration and adventure. The Angels weren’t un-American but rather “as uniquely American as jazz … a human hangover from the era of the Wild West.” Cowboys with hogs instead of horses.
But where there’s danger, there’s excitement—vertiginous, full-throttle excitement. Thompson was able to capture in his mad-dog prose what the Angels knew all along: that a speed trip down an empty freeway on a motorcycle is something like an ecstatic awakening, or a very good drug experience:
Into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out … thirty-five, forty-five … then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run … then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board … Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly—zaapppp—going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea.
Despite his best efforts not to oversell the Angels, many readers felt a strong kinship with them. Thompson received countless letters from fans inquiring about club membership. To one teenage fan, Thompson provided strong cautionary words. “The best of the Angels,” he wrote in a letter dated July 6, 1967, “the guys you might want to sit down and talk to, have almost all played that game for a while and then quit for something better. The ones who left are almost all the kind who can’t do anything else, and they’re not much fun to talk to. They’re not smart, or funny, or brave, or even original. They’re just Old Punks, and that’s a lot worse than being a Young Punk.”
The Angels reveled in the attention, particularly since Thompson had at least some of their story right. “That book was helpful in putting us on the road to where we are today,” said Sonny Barger, “but he embellished.” There are indeed touches of gloss throughout. Thompson describes Barger as a “six-foot, 170-pound warehouseman from East Oakland” when in fact Barger measured five foot nine and weighed 140 pounds. Thompson also described the initiation ritual as a dousing of a prospective member in dung and urine collected from other members, but no such ritual existed. Those were niggling facts, however; by completing the rough draft of the Angels’ history, Thompson had produced a riveting chronicle of an American tribe without a homeland, displaced by the mainstream and lost in perpetual exile. By doing so, he had brought himself out of freelance exile, finally; magazine editors would know who the hell he was, all right.
INTO THE ABYSS
To the small coterie of countercultural trendspotters on the left, the Hell’s Angels were right out there on the front lines of social revolt. But they represented a blank slate upon which idealists such as Kesey could fill in whatever notions of rebellion appealed to them. As an outsider who had stumbled into an uneasy role as the Angels’ emissary to the mainstream, Hunter Thompson knew better. He had spent too much time with them, witnessed too much ugliness, to think of the Angels as anyt
hing but unenlightened thugs. The Angels’ final break with Kesey, and by extension the counterculture, came on October 16, 1965, when Sonny Barger and a handful of bikers crashed a Get Out of Vietnam rally at the Oakland-Berkeley line, a formal protest in which both Kesey and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg participated.
In recounting the incident near the end of Hell’s Angels, Thompson wrote:
The existential heroes who had passed the joint with Berkeley liberals at Kesey’s parties suddenly turned into venomous beasts, rushing on the same liberals with flailing fists and shouts of “Traitors,” “Communists,” “Beatniks!” When push came to shove, the Hell’s Angels lined up solidly with the cops, the Pentagon and the John Birch Society.
The fragile alliance between the Pranksters and the Angels was torn apart by sharply divergent attitudes toward the Vietnam War. In a few years’ time, that conflict would fan out across the country like brushfire.
From the start, the nature and scope of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam had been shrouded in secrecy and obfuscation. The Southeast Asian country had been repeatedly jostled by the tides of history. The area that came to be known as South Vietnam was conquered by the French in 1863, and France grabbed control of the North in 1883. In 1940, the Japanese occupied mainland Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. After the Japanese surrendered to Allied forces in 1945, control of North Vietnam was ceded to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of a band of Communist insurrectionaries who formed a provisional government, with the French stubbornly clinging to the South.
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 18
